A Herculean feat: raising the Bayonne Bridge (photos, video)

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STATEN ISLAND, N.Y.-- Staten Islanders don't have to go far to see an engineering marvel in progress and the first of its kind ever attempted.

Raising the road bed of the Bayonne Bridge 64 feet while traffic continuously flows across the span is unprecedented in the annals of engineering, and a unique set of circumstances starting with the bridge's design more than 80 years ago have made this project possible, said Joann Papageorgis, a program director with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

"This is going to be an amazing project-- never been done before have they built a deck over an existing bridge while keeping the bridge open to traffic," she said.

FACTSAND FIGURES

Currently the span has the lowest navigational clearance of any bridge in the area and one of the lowest in the country at 151 feet, and raising it to 215 feet above the Kill van Kull will put it more in line with the average-- about 290 feet nationally-- or closer to its immediate neighbor the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which sits about 217 feet above the water depending on the tide.

Upon completion the bridge will include four 12-foot wide lanes-- two in each direction-- a 12-foot wide pedestrian/biking path, nearly 5-foot wide shoulders on each side and the possibility of a future light rail.

The new walkway will not have stairs but a ramp so bicyclists could ride across, and it will be on the east side of the bridge as opposed to the recently removed walkway on the west. At some point in the future when officials decide on a transit corridor on the Island, the west side of the bridge will be available for a light rail option.

"With the clearance, we also get a brand new infrastructure that hopefully will connect New York and New Jersey for the next 100 years," Ms. Papageorgis said of the 100-year life expectancy of the revamped span.

Also all the water runoff from the bridge will be channeled and collected in a detention pond on the Port Authority's Staten Island property and slowly released into the city's collection system.

"It will be the only bridge in the region where all water runoff from the bridge will be treated before it is released," she added.

The span crosses the busiest shipping channel on the East Coast of the United States, which sees 30 percent of shipping traffic from Maine to Florida navigate under it and supports 280,000 related jobs, Ms. Papageorgis said.

Of the $1.29 billion invested in this project, more than $380 million will be in wages. The ports account for about $36.1 billion in annual revenue.

PANAMA CONNECTION

Although the "Raise the Roadway" project was not specifically coordinated with widening the Panama Canal officials at the Port Authority knew that project would allow new, larger "super container ships" access to America's ports.

"If you go to the Panama Canal now and you see the existing ships, sometimes they have about a couple inches on either side for clearance," Ms. Papageorgis said. "It's very, very tight; they're just squeezing through. So the issue is the width, but as they become wider and longer, they also become bigger and taller."

To stay competitive the raising was advanced along with the Army Corps of Engineers dredging of the New York Harbor, and other massive improvement projects at many of America's ports.

LUCKY BREAKS

Originally the Panama Canal project was scheduled to conclude in 2014, but that date was pushed back to 2015, which will now coincide with the expected fall 2015 removal of the old road bed. The dates will almost match up to allow the necessary clearance.

At that point traffic will be traveling on half of the completed bridge-- one lane in each direction-- 215 feet above the Kill van Kull. The new roadway, medians, and walkway are expected to be completed in the second quarter of 2017.

"There is a key interim milestone in the fourth quarter of 2015 when half the bridge will be built at the higher elevation, such that we can switch traffic up there and remove the lower existing deck, which is a navigational obstruction," said Dennis Stabile, project manager for the Bayonne Bridge. "That coincides with the date of when the Panama Canal expansion is expected to be completed, so that works out well."

The Bayonne Bridge is the only arched bridge designed by Othmar H. Ammann, who designed many suspension bridges familiar to Staten Islanders such as the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge; George Washington Bridge; Throgs Neck Bridge; Bronx-Whitestone Bridge; Triborough Bridge and the Walt Whitman Bridge in Philadelphia.

This arched design is what allows the Port Authority to raise the road bed, Ms. Papageorgis said.

"Had this not been an arch we wouldn't been able to raise the deck because an arch is a very strong structural member," Ms. Papageorgis said. "So it was almost destiny that he knew one day that we would do this because if this were like his other (suspension) bridges we would never have been able to do this. It's just kind of interesting that this was his only arch, and this is the one bridge that we needed to raise the roadway for."

With Staten Island and Bayonne built up around the bridge's bases, constructing a new span would require property taking and a whole host of other hurdles to cross.

LOCAL IMPACT

Half of the toll booths on the Staten Island side have been removed, and the approaching section of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Expressway have been removed.

The Richmond Terrace exit 13-- the last exit in New York on the expressway-- has been closed and will remain closed until the fall 2015. Intersections along the detour have been re-striped to improve the traffic flow.

Weekday overnight closures of the bridge began Wednesday and will run to February, keeping the span opened to traffic on the weekends and on holidays. There will also be eight full weekend closures per year during the project, and they will be announced prior to the dates needed.

The closures are necessary so workers can lift the massive steel and concrete sections in place above the bridge.

"We're never lifting up and over an active travel lane," Ms. Papageorgis said. "But we're never lifting up and over anyone's property either."

The traffic impact from the closures and the single lane in each direction for the next three years should be minimal since the Bayonne Bridge has the lowest volume of any Port Authority crossing with 350 vehicles per hour during peak travel times and a total of about 350 vehicles crossing at night, Stabile said.

Portable sound barriers have been put in place around work areas to mitigate some of the construction noise, and the contractor measures noise levels with meters. If the noise exceeds city standards they are instructed to stop the work "within minutes" and they "restart the work in an alternate way" or provide additional "noise abatement," Stabile explained.

Customer service offices should be completed in about a month next to the Bayonne Bridge administration building at Trantor Place and John Street where neighbors could walk in and get information or register complaints about any aspect of the construction process.

Residents could also call 1-855-265-5482 for general information or noise complaints, and to receive regular updates and real-time alerts folks can sign up at www.paalerts.com.